At any time, will any of the work done here be able to be used commercially or sold? I'm not too keen on crunching frames for something that will be used to make money. Will people be able to spend their BurpBucks on a video that will be used as a commercial or other for-profit use?

I personally do not mind rendering for commercial projects or other people's profit. Commercial interests will provide greater support for this public project.

I also do not think commercial projects will consume significant BURP resources. The open nature of BURP exposes any project being rendered to the general public. I would love to render frames for Disney's next blockbuster computer animation, but even if they could use BURP they would not let their confidential work out. Even advertisers would not want their promotions open to the public before launch.

Well, i don\'t think commercial use of the system will be an issue. To render you need to have done as much rendering for others as your own render will use. Or you can use real bucks which would support the operation of the project.

Hello! I think we could vote for project which will be rendered. Everybody could have so many votes how many credits she gained. Some wiki web page for presenting projects before vote and presenting results after rendering could be very fine!

Imho, if someone will donate burp, and after a while he will need to render 30 second long advertisment to television (with burp link at the end ;), and say, that he will donate burp again, if it will be renderes... imho it would be unfair to dischard him.

Of course, the film which will make big big money in cinemas...

I probably have no problems, if \"comercionaly\" rendered project will be on burp, but with that, that the payment will be a good friend, which will propagate burp, and probable donate it. (and the comercionaly rendered work doesnt make any money directly!)

How can we maintain the infrastructure that allows distributed rendering to the amateur community? Are donations alone going to allow BURP to run indefinitely?

As any commercial use of the distributed network requires either payment to BURP or input of equal time just as with any non-commercial use, my only issue would be if the BURP team started selling secret runs that were not posted on the site once completed. By itself that will seriously limit the number of projects that use the network.

If an independent group wants to make a CGI video with limited resources, BURP might be the perfect method. They can put spare CPU time back into the system and pay for extra time used which keeps the network open for hobbyists with even less resources. At the end of the run, we can all watch the video (though probably without sound) and they can sell the video on Amazon.com.

Bottom line is that the infrastructure that will allow hobbyists to quickly render complex videos for free won\'t run on donated cycles alone. I\'d obviously reconsider donating my cycles if I thought the network were no longer focused on providing my CPU time primarily to hobbyists, but I\'d also be very interested in having part of my CPU time donated to making independent CGI films more wide-spread.

Note that this is just my opinion. No need to drop BURP at the moment as it\'s still in Alpha and is not in any way crunching commercial videos as far as I know.

Commercial rendering is a very sensitive topic for many - and rightly so. That is also why we are probably headed towards a setup that isn\'t as black or white as most suggestions posted so far.
Firstly there is a group of people (A) who would like to donate CPU cycles, but only to non-commercial sessions. Then there\'s a group of people (B) who haven\'t really decided, and lastly a group of people (C) who don\'t care if the sessions are used commercially or not.
The intention would be to satisfy all the above groups by making commercial renders an option that you have to actively opt-in to. This could for instance be by having two different schedulers, one for normal sessions and one for commercial ones. Groups (A) and (B) would register with the normal scheduler, where group (C) would register with both. (This could be by checking a checkbox \"Allow commercial rendering\" in your prefferences)
A commercial session would have to follow the same rules about distribution as usual sessions do - ie. by submitting a session you allow BURP to redistribute the input/temp/output-files to its users and the general public. However, as with regular sessions, the copyright is retained and people may not use the contents of your files for derivative work.

Some have suggested that BURP should take money for the commercial renders. However this would make BURP itself commercial - which would mean a buckload of issues relating to tax stuff, licensing etc. This is not what I want to do as it would take out a lot of the fun in the project for me.

The original milestones for the project (which were created as one of the very first files) says that the decision on whether to include commercial rendering or not is a decision that should be made while in Beta. However, if the decision is that \"yes we do want to enable commercial rendering\" then you can feel pretty sure that it will be done in a way very similar to what was outlined earlier in this post.

If you have any questions or ideas regarding rendering commercial sessions please feel very free to post them already now - a good open discussion is what is going to make it possible to easily do the right things later on.

How can we maintain the infrastructure that allows distributed rendering to the amateur community? Are donations alone going to allow BURP to run indefinitely?

BURP was from the very beginning designed to be fueled by \"good feelings and friendlyness\" alone. Some user in the forums came up with the idea of donations as well - further underlining that the community is the main driver in this project.
We have reached a point were BURP could potentially keep running like it is forever (provided that none of the mirror owners decide to stop their effort during that time). The number of donations affect how much new/replacement hardware can be bought, how fast a network connection can be afforded, how much BURP could grow etc. These are all factors that come into play when talking about performance and progress, not when talking about whether or not BURP would exist. Granted, BURP would not be the same without donations - it would be much slower and there would be many limiting factors, but it would still work; at least as long as the mirror owners continue to help out.

So to answer your question: Donations are what allows BURP to progress and become bigger and better than what it already is. Friendlyness is what keep things running.

I actually may belong in group (D) participants that would prefer commercial renders, assuming a commercial render is required to mention BURP and/or BOINC in the credits. That may give us the exposure to make more CPU time available for all renders. On the other hand I do not want to see commercial renders push out other renders.

In my opinion the spendable cobblestones will even things out for commercial renders. It would instantly at least double the power of the commercial renderfarm while ensuring that CPU time is available to other renders.BOINC WIKI
BOINCing since 2002/12/8

I think commercial rendering is possible via a seperate Credit-System.
Anyone who wants to render a commercial project have to buy credits.
He earns money... he should pay...
So there is a way to use burp as commecial renderfarm.

But why? Burp is a free Ugly Rendering Project?

Espacially, the payments of commercially rendering have to go 100% into expanding Hardware and Infrastructure of the Burp-\"Community\"-Project.
So the team or everything Burp related get money for exiting Alpha-Phase ;)

I would exspect great Improvements if more people, possible Commercial Specialists would work for money at Burp-Headquarter ;)

Me for myself would appreciate a Rendering with my Computer included, if there
is a payment of many hundrets of Euro / Dollar for Expanding Burp-Hardware and Servers etc.

Commercial/Donation Law! ;)

I see commercial rendering as a \"sponsoring\"... every Formula1 Team and every Baseballteam gets Money for their expansion...

I got less money... but i would support Burp if i could... but i can\'t. Commercial rendering on my mashine would be a way i think...

There has to be a edge which extremely divide Commercial and Public Part of Burp.

I have been working with BURP for about a year or so. I would like to make animations like Lord of the Rings. I am just starting out in the rendering community and I see great potential for the fantasy genera. I would like to start my own rendering company and I would love to be able to use this great concept to turn a great series like \"Lord of the Rings\" full and by the book. No cut scenes, regardless of how long it would take. I have seen many movies that take great books and chop them up and miss all of the little and important parts. I would like to use this system to do such a thing. If the movie makes it in the theaters then I would be all to happy to give 50% of the earnings back into BURP.

Of course I\'m no were near ready to finish my certificate from school let alone start a company and find enough people to work on any project of this size.

I like to dream and I can see great things coming from a concept like this one. So someone like me that is an avid fan of this project, I hope that when the time comes I would be able to use this system to fulfill my dreams.When life is to big to tackle, kick it in the shins.

Janus, I think the concept of the opt-in for non commerical / commercial / both rendering is a good idea.

But, I see some points of a commercial rendering a little bit problematic...

A lot of things would done by volunteers, for example mirroring, helpdesk, input and suggestions on the forums, etc. If the project would allow commercial rendering, the companies make in my opinion profit of the work of the voulunteers.
I would not invest my spare time for a thing where a company makes indirect profits from my knowledge and help.

There are a lot of volunteers and crunchers which would be discouraged by any commercial aspect or project. There are a lot of different BOINC projects out there, so it could be that the project would lose a lot of volunteers which decide to crunch for non profit projects.

As more I think about this topic, as more I think it is better to not allow commercial rendering and let the project for non profit rendering only.

Dotsch brings up some valid points. In light of that if it is not too difficult making a seperate project that does both comercial and non-comercial renders may be the best route. If it is too difficult then I guess I\'ll just have to hope that someone else decides to make a commercial project. I am really surprized that none of the major studios have thought of this, they should be able to dramatically reduce their costs.BOINC WIKI
BOINCing since 2002/12/8

I would render images/videos for profit only if the burp project gets a percent back from the sales of those images/videos
and has somewhere in the video \"Render by BURP (http://burp.boinc.dk/) XX% is give to burp to fund future burp projects\"

I would render images/videos for profit only if the burp project gets a percent back from the sales of those images/videos
and has somewhere in the video \"Render by BURP (http://burp.boinc.dk/) XX% is give to burp to fund future burp projects\"

I am shocked about the opinions about the profit rendering. I hope, that Janus can say more about this topic, and how it would be handeled.
In the meantime, I will set my clients to now new work, and stop my porting help for different Unixes. The existing binaires are still downloadable.
As I have stated, I would not spend my free time for a project which could use this for making profit in some time.